The Emergence Of A New 'Unemployed Class' Reveals The Futility Of Bernanke's Quantitative Easing

A Tuesday piece by the NYT's David Leonhardt has been getting a lot of attention, in large part due to this stat:

Over the course of 1980, 18.1 percent of the labor force was unemployed at some point. In 2008, the first year of this slump, only 13.2 percent was, according to the Labor Department’s most up-to-date data. That number surely rose in 2009, but it is unlikely to have come close to the 1982 peak of 22 percent.

That's pretty astounding, and it should show you why monetary policy, no matter how aggressive, isn't likely to fix the situation in the economy.

This isn't a business cycle where businesses get too nervous, cut back, see they've overshot, and then compensate by hiring back (you know, the whole Animal Spirits cycle, and whatnot).

This is a totally different beast relating to a combination of deleveraging (still plenty of room to go on that front) and massive mismatches in skills and need due to the housing bubble. Nothing the Fed does can change those facts.

The truth it, there's no good solution to the problem of the mis-skiled (job retraining, for example, doesn't actually work). But we can be especially sure that more cheap money isn't going to move the needle on this issue much.